Towards team formation via automated planning

Abstract

Cooperative problem solving involves four key phases: (1) finding potential members to form a team, (2) forming the team, (3) formulating a plan for the team, and (4) executing the plan. We extend recent work on multi-agent epistemic planning and apply it to the problem of team formation in a blocksworld scenario. We provide an encoding of the first three phases of team formation from the perspective of an initiator, and show how automated planning efficiently yields conditional plans that guarantee certain collective intentions will be achieved. The expressiveness of the epistemic planning formalism, which supports modelling with the nested beliefs of agents, opens the prospect of broad applicability to the operationalisation of collective intention.